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If so, what dark thing was there in the record of Strood's life that he must change his name, disappear from the world, and avoid the summer nights, the days of sunshine and storm on the high rock-ledges and the ice-slope? Chayne was minded to find an answer to that question. Sylvia was in trouble; that house under the downs was no place for her.
If Allah, he thought, could thus imprint a perfect likeness of trees and water on the hot, still air, He would have no difficulty in painting a few rocks golden. The sun was fierce. For miles they saw no shade, but only strange rock-ledges rising no higher than a doorstep above the sand, which grew low, prickly shrubs. A range of hills before them seemed hopelessly remote.
Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney's men and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French.
And he flitted on across the desert: over rock-ledges, and banks of shingle, and level wastes of sand, and shell-drifts bleaching in the sunshine, and the skeletons of great sea-monsters, and dead bones of ancient giants, strewn up and down upon the old sea-floor.
The flowers, though most of them were buried or partly so, were to some extent recognizable, the bluebells bent over, shining like eyes through the snow, and the gentians, too, with their corollas twisted shut; cassiope I could recognize under any disguise; and two species of dwarf willow with their seeds already ripe, one with comparatively small leaves, were growing in mere cracks and crevices of rock-ledges where the dry snow could not lie.
The reader must fancy for himself the loveliest brook which he ever saw in Devonshire or Yorkshire, Ireland or Scotland; crystal-clear, bedded with gray pebbles, broken into rapids by rock-ledges or great white quartz boulders, swirling under steep cliffs, winding through flats of natural meadow and copse.
There is a lull, and you can see the surface of the fields settling furiously in one direction a tide that spurts from between the tree-boles. The hollows of the pasture fill while you watch; empty, fill, and discharge anew. The rock-ledges show the bare flank of a storm-chased liner for a moment, and whitening, duck under.
All seemed good and fair to him, and whiles he looked around him, and saw the long dale lying on his left hand and the dark yews in its jaws pressing up against the rock-ledges of the brook, and on his right its windings as the ground rose up to the buttresses of the great ridge.
There is no overcoat warmer than the pines in a gale when the woods for miles round are singing like cathedral organs, and the first snow of the year powders the rock-ledges. The mosses and lichens, green, sulphur, and amber, stud the copper floor of needles, where the feathery ground-pine runs aimlessly to and fro along the ground, spelling out broken words of half-forgotten charms.
"But what is this?" said I, gazing around upon two camp beds, spread with white coverlets, and a dressing-table with a jugful of lilac-coloured stocks, such as grew in the crannies of the keep and the rock-ledges under the platform. "I had no mother," said she, "to prepare my bride-chamber, and rough is the best I can prepare for my child. But it is done with my blessing."
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